Yesterday's post on fine-tuning concluded with a question as to how someone who's skeptical of the existence of a cosmic designer might respond to the argument from fine-tuning. By way of answering that question I invite you to watch another video featuring an astrophysicist who explains the multiverse hypothesis and how it purports to explain cosmic fine-tuning without reference to an intelligent creator.
It's a generally good presentation, but there are a couple of things in the video that I think are a bit misleading. For instance, at the 0:53 mark the scientist claims that the lack of indisputable proof of a designer is a "big problem" for theism, but this is simply not so.
What's required to reasonably draw a theistic conclusion is not proof but evidence, and the existence of an astronomically improbable system which performs a specified and extraordinary function (permitting life) is prima facie evidence of intelligent engineering.
Just as an astronaut exploring Mars would, if he discovered a domed structure containing within itself all the necessary features for supporting life, consider that discovery to be strong evidence that intelligent beings had been there before him and designed the structure, so too, the numerous, exquisitely calibrated parameters of the universe constitute strong evidence that a designer has engineered the universe.
At the 1:46 mark the narrator asserts that "Why and how the universe came into being don't matter", but they surely do.
If it is accepted that nothing causes itself to come into being and that everything that does come into being has a cause then the universe's coming into being must have been caused. And if it was caused that cause must've been something that transcends the space-time universe of matter and energy. Thus, the cause would be neither spatial nor temporal nor material. It would also have to be extremely powerful and intelligent.
In other words, whatever caused the universe sounds a lot like the God of theism.
Then at the 2:28 mark it's claimed that in the multiverse, everything that could possibly happen does happen, but if this is so, and if the multiverse is an attempt to avoid theism, the theory shoots itself in the foot. If every possibility is instantiated somewhere in the multiverse then there must be a world somewhere in the manifold in which God exists and Jesus rises from the dead.
Both of these states of affairs are certainly possible, both logically and physically, even if only minutely probable (but then so is the existence of our universe only minutely probable), therefore there must be a world in the multiverse landscape in which both of these are true, and our world just happens to be it.
Anyway, watch the video and see what you think:
